The Man Who Left, the Father Who Came Back.

MY father, Richard B. Snow, was happily running his own Manhattan architecture practice when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and he was quickly taken into a service that needed people who knew about structures. The Navy gave him a good job: he put on a nice, new uniform and every couple of days went to Brooklyn or Staten Island to inspect new shipyards and barracks and all the other buildings being conjured up by the war, making sure that the support beams were in the right places, that there were enough fire hydrants. On the way home to sleep in his own bed, he'd be saluted by sailors back from fighting the German U-boats in the Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]